OrthodoxWiki:Trapeza

In a monastery, a trapeza (or refectory), is the dining hall where monks and pilgrims gather for food and conversation (although monks don't usually talk during meals). The OrthodoxWiki trapeza serves as the main discussion point for our website. Please feel free to join in—ask anything, suggest an idea, make a comment. We're glad to have you here. For other, more specifically designated discussion pages, check out the Community Portal.

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Contents

a hello on a new page

So... My goal is to get to 4900 on unique articles before too long. I'd definitely eventually like to see the 4 flip to a 5... :) There's a lot of stuff out there that could be written about. Take care! Katjuscha (talk) 20:28, May 11, 2016 (UTC)

Sounds great, Katjuscha! Please note this previous discussion on Eliminating_directory_articles - there is certainly room for overviews and histories, but a major problem with making a directory of parishes is that things can get out of date very quickly. — FrJohn (talk)

Understood. :) As far as the Bulgarian diocese page, I figured I'd just clean it up a bit since it's been sitting there with some VERY old information (priests' names, for example) for a couple of years. As it was a priest in the diocese referenced who posted the info in the first place, I didn't necessarily want to just clear out the whole thing. Hope that reasoning makes some sense. :) Katjuscha (talk) 01:35, May 12, 2016 (UTC)

A note on something I noticed

Fr. John, the updates look great, thank you for the hard work! :) I've noticed a couple of little hiccups, but it looks like most of them have been smoothed out (the captcha acting silly, for one). This isn't a big thing at all, but under "Special Pages", the "active users list" doesn't work anymore. It always shows no active users, and a note that it's a cached page that might be up to 101 days old. (This number gets bigger all the time.) I think somewhere this stat must still be working, because I think on the statistics page, it does show the actual number of active users, but when you click on that, it brings you to the page that shows none. Hope you are well! :) Katjuscha (talk) 13:05, May 19, 2016 (UTC)

Hmm... there is this bug report: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T89027. I also tried clearing caches, running the Special Pages update script... didn't work. Since this is reflected on RecentChanges, I don't think it is critical, but I am glad you pointed it out.

author credits?

I was under the impression that articles on this wiki (other than protected pages that are reprinted by permission) are not supposed to have 'authorship' mentioned in the article. A couple months ago, I removed something like this from the article Holy Trinity Church (San Francisco, California), but now the "author" has put the credit to himself as author back in. He's also given himself credit on the article Annunciation Greek Orthodox Cathedral (San Francisco, California), but at least he references back to an article he wrote that was posted elsewhere on the internet. Not being a sysop or anything, I don't want to get into an edit war here. Katjuscha (talk) 02:09, May 23, 2016 (UTC)

The author trail is preserved in page history, and not typically in attribution on the page. I'm not too worried about this, but, especially, if someone else substantially revises/addes to the articles, I have no problem with them remove the author attribution either. By submitting content to the wiki, they have agreed to license it according to our copyright policy.

St. Ioann Listvinnik?

I've been reading a bit about historic churches in Alaska, and I saw mentioned that in Tigalda (Tigalda Island, perhaps), a church was consecrated in 1844, dedicated to St. Ioann Listvinnik. Anybody know if this is correct or that it might be in error? Thanks. :) Katjuscha (talk) 01:13, June 6, 2016 (UTC)

Question:

When it comes to posting biographical information, should we have some sort of policy shying away from posting too much information about living people, especially Americans, due to identity theft issues? For people born between 1970-2011, and in particular from about 1987-2011, when you have some combination of family name, birthplace, and exact date of birth, it becomes easier to guess social security numbers, especially if someone was born in a state with a smaller population. I understand that much of this information is publicly available; I just would rather not have OrthodoxWiki be the "to-go" place for people looking to steal the identities of well-known Orthodox personalities. My general policy has been to not post exact dates of birth for people in this age range, being as that seems to be the least relevant item for OrthodoxWiki, and probably the most sensitive for identity theft, but then I see someone here who keeps putting that information back up.

Not sure about the SSNs, but I do think in general we should exercise some discretion in posting details about living people. Wikipedia practice can be a guide here. Obviously, things like biographies and general biographical sketches are fine, especially when this information is not controversial and someone is a public figure already. — FrJohn (talk) 17:53, August 23, 2016 (UTC)

August 6 and November 8

They represent the mid-season days, standing half-way between the solstice and the equinox. The same holds true for Saint Valentine's Day, which however is not celebrated liturgically in the East.

Summer Solstice: Birth of Saint John the Baptist (June 24).

Mid-Summer: Transfiguration of Christ (August 6).

Autumn Equinox: Conception of Saint John the Baptist (September 23).

Mid-Autumn: Holy Archangels Michael and Gabriel (November 8).

Winter Solstice: Christmas (December 25).

Mid-Winter: Saint Valentine's Day (February 14, West only).

Spring Equinox: Annunciation (March 25).

There is no particular Mid-Spring Feast (roughly around May 10), mostly because of the fact that such symbolism would have been swallowed up by the Great Feasts tied to the Paschal cycle, such as Palm Sunday, EasterSunday, Ascension, and Pentecost (or Whit Sunday), depending on how early or how late they fall in the year. In the East, Candlemas seems to have swallowed up all the agricultural symbolism which would normally have been associated with a mid-February celebration (not that this does not happen to some extent in the West as well, see Groundhog Day).

I think that this information might be useful and interesting, but I have no idea where to add it exactly. — Luci83ro (talk) 02:51, September 23, 2016 (UTC)

Two questions

Please advise I like the category navigation at the bottom of the page which shows the entire category tree. Can someone tell me how this was set up for this wiki? Also, I would be interested in writing about Anabaptism and Quakerism and see how these Radical Christian branches would be viewed by the Orthodox and how these communities have interacted in the past. I understand the point of view on this site is Orthodox and the scope is mostly about Orthodoxy--would articles like this be welcome here? -Justin (koavf)·T·C·M 23:24, October 2, 2016 (UTC)

Hi Justin. I don't think there is any special plugin for the categories - this is just normal MediaWiki functionality. About the Anabaptists and Quakers, I think an article about specific history of relations, theological dialogues, etc. could be interesting. I don't think this is the place for an exhaustive treatment of AnabaptistQuaker theology - hope that makes sense. — FrJohn (talk) 01:23, October 3, 2016 (UTC)

Theological discussions It does and that's consistent with what I thought was the case. I know that some Anabaptists traded letters with Eastern Christians during the Radical Reformation when they were being persecuted unto death by Catholics and Protestants. I'm not sure how many sources there are on this but I'd like to know. Furthermore, I'd be interested in seeing what some Orthodox perspectives would be on these groups. Thanks--I will try to get together the sources sometime to draft up an article. If anyone else has feedback, please let me know. -Justin (koavf)·T·C·M 01:39, October 3, 2016 (UTC)

One thing to keep in mind for OrthodoxWiki is that we aim to be encyclopedia like, meaning the focus is on the who, what, where, and when rather than personal interpretation. Following Wikipedia, we have called this the ""neutral point of view", although we also have an "Orthodox bias".